K is for Knowledgeable
by Motsie of Atlantis
Summary: Callen wondered if he needed another session with Dr. Nate Getz. The man knew just as many secrets about the agent, as Hetty did, but he had pulled them from the depths of Callen's brain. Maybe he could trick the doctor into revealing something that he found there to better Understand who and what he really was.


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 **K is for Knowledgeable**

At the wake for the woman who began to change his life as a child, Callen wonders what word other people would use to describe him. These were the people who made him who and what he had become. As he looked over those around him, he pondered the influence each had in his life.

Written as a response for 'ABC is for family', Gina Callen's entry in the Facebook Writers Challenge, the prompt being ABC, and expanding my stor is for Team' because I received requests to add to the alphabet and finish the team

 **A/N:** Thanks Gina for letting me use parts of your great story for this one. I just hope I do justice to your work as I try to carry on the idea and expand the alphabet for those around our agent/hero and thanks Sue for being more than a beta – reading, suggesting, always improving the work that I post.

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 **901 Bar and Grill, Los Angeles, California**

There was one more person who could not attend this celebration because only Hetty knew where he had been sent. Dr. Nate Getz was definitely a member of this team, perhaps maybe even more important than the team leader. As the clinical Psychologist for OSP, he was an expert at getting into anybody's head, and could take an agent off active status at a moment's notice. Then he would force them to prove that they were sane enough to continue working with all of the stress that this job brought along with it. That was the reason why Callen assigned the letter 'K' to Nate because of the "Knowledge" the man had, of his field of study, and of the mental secrets he had pried from the minds of his subjects.

If he would be here, everyone would know it because the man literally stood head and shoulders above everyone else. But even though Nate had taken agent training, and had practiced his hand to hand and weapon skills with the members of the team, he was never considered an agent like the rest of them. When he was sent out into the field, it was not because of his prowess with a weapon or his fists. He was farmed out to the other divisions to help them profile specific targets and monitoring the state of mind of the agents as they engage in their missions. Yet, no matter how often he left, nor how far away he traveled, if Hetty Lange asked for him to come back to help the team, he would do everything possible to comply with her request.

 **. . . . .**

Nathanial Joseph Getz was for all intents and purposes, a lost boy. The middle of five children, he was easily overlooked by both family and friends. The only way the family could tell he was missing was when they lined up together. The other four children, Mike, Kim, Bobby, and Lissa, were usually placed in front of their parents, and because of his height, Nate stood in the back row, between his mother and father.

Nathanial Joseph Getz e was born September 28, 1978. He was four years younger than his brother Michael Scott and two younger than his sister Kimberly Erin. These three children were born while his father Glenn was a district warehouse manager for Allied Van Line company in Huston, Texas. The year after Nate was born, the district manager in New Bedford, Massachusetts died suddenly and his father was transferred there. Kathleen, his mother, was left to pack up the three kids and the house to follow after him. The next year, his other brother, Robert John, was born and the baby of the family, Melissa Nicole came along three years after that.

Michael and Melissa were both good athletes and filled the mantle with their trophies. Mike excelled at football, basketball, and running shorter distances in track. Lissa surpassed the other members of her team in cheerleading, basketball, and softball. Both of them were all-conference their last three years in high school.

Kimberly was the dancer in the family. She started ballet class when she was just seven and rapidly rose through the ranks to be a prima ballerina. Her senior year the company she was in did the traditional version of 'The Nutcracker' and Kim was chosen to dance the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Every step, every motion, was just perfect.

Robert was the artist. Like his other siblings, Bobby's preschool pictures that he brought home were proudly posted on the refrigerator. When he was in fourth grade, he met a couple of local artists at the farmer's market, who agreed to help tutor him and allowed him to share their studio. By the time he entered High School, he was beginning to make a name for himself with his paintings and sculptures that were displayed at the board of education building and several of the local art galleries,

Among these talented children, Nate was the odd child out. Athletically he was uncoordinated enough that all the school sports were beyond his capabilities. He was way too tall to dance with any of the ballerinas in the troop, besides not having the strength to throw and catch them as the major characters were required to do. He never was able to stay within the lines of his coloring books and his student art projects looked more like a refugee from the junkyard than anything else.

The one place where he found his niche among his high school classmates was doing the research for the debate team. He seemed to be able to pull apart the various facets of the topic and give the other members of the team different slants on looking at the subject. After they arrived at the venue, he always looked at the members of the other teams, to see what he could find out about them. He always seemed to be able to tell who was overconfident, who was worried, who seemed unprepared, and reported it back to his team. Because of his careful observations, they picked up one or two extra points in a couple of their debates. The members of the team were thankful for his efforts, but there were no medals or trophies for him to take home to share with his family. He felt lucky if any of his family members would show up for the debate, let alone notice what part he played in the preparations.

But there was someone who did notice. Bryan Whitley Merritt, a senior at Wesleyan University and captain of the college debate team there happened to be home for the Christmas holidays one year and watched Nate as he helped his team prepare for the competition. He immediately got to work on several arguments to be presented by the team. As they were completing their cases, Nate started to stare at the people of the opposing team. The boy appeared to be stripping each of them down to their very core. Then he went and huddled with the members of his team and excited whispers flowed among those members. Every once in a while, one of the team would raise their head and look at their opponents with a great big smile on their face. They won the debate, and each team member congratulated Nate, so he must have had some hand in the victory.

Bryan went over to the team's faculty adviser to ask about Nate. Mr. Dotson told him about what Nate did for the team and introduced the two younger men. They talked about the principles of debate and how well Nate was doing in school. Bryan told him that he should apply to Wesleyan at the end of the year. Nate felt as if he was joking because he knew that his parents couldn't afford a school like that.

 **. . . . .**

When it came time to apply for college, Nate began to look at state schools closer to their home in New Bedford, Massachusetts. His father was a district manager with Allied Van Line company and had moved his family there from Huston, Texas in 1986. But Mike had just graduated college and Kim was just starting her junior year. Nate figured his only chances were the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth or maybe one of the community colleges. He knew that he didn't want to go to the New Bedford Institute of Technology because he had no interest in textiles or fabric sciences. He was more interested in the mental sciences and was seriously considering pursuing a degree in psychology or psychiatry. When he was done filling out all of his college applications, he found that he had one other transcript that he could send off. Nate remembered Bryan's urging to try Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut. He knew his GPA, his ACT, and SATs were pretty good so he thought what did he have to lose and sent it in.

He never knew why he got the acceptance letter back from Wesleyan, his grades, the reference letter his pastor added, or a favorable word from Bryan's dad, Frank Lawrence Merritt, who was a generous yearly supporter of the university, in the ear of one of the members of the selection committee. They also offered him an academic scholarship that would cover most of his schooling. After a phone call from Bryan, urging him to accept, Nate began planning to move to Connecticut.

Nate enjoyed his time at Wesleyan, double majoring in psychology and government. He was especially intrigued when he attended a guest lecture by Dr. Aasim Samra, professor of Islamic sciences and religion at the University of Ez-Zitouna in Tunis. The professor claimed that the Arab and Western mind operated on different levels. Western thinking had never considered the concept of zero, always operating on the concept of the one. To a Westerner, the individual was most important, and everything that was done depended on what impacts it made upon that one. To an Arab mind, the individual is relegated to a zero. Islam means surrendering or submitting your will to God.

Nate wondered if this would carry over into the profiling studies he was learning about. After talking with his faculty advisor, he decided to make this a major part of his educational studies. His study abroad semester was supposed to be in southern France, but he wanted to slip across the Mediterranean and spent most of his time in Algiers, loosely based out of the University of Oran there. The Algerian Civil War put a stop to that. The Islamists declared jihad against those that did not share their ideals and it was feared that foreigners might be the first to be killed in this conflict. All of northwest Africa was declared a no travel zone for Americans, and Nate spent the whole of his time in Marseille, talking to members of the Muslim community there.

He graduated with honors, and his family and the Merritts who had almost adopted him into their family celebrated his graduation. He surprised everyone by announcing that he was going to do his graduate work at Harvard. Frank and Sheila Merritt invited him to live at their home in Boston while he was attending school there.

 **. . . . .**

Hetty's first contact with Nate Getz was when he was doing a clinical rotation at Massachusetts General Hospital as part of his masters' work. Hetty was keeping the death watch at over one of her junior agents who mistakenly thought he could outrun a bullet. After sitting in his room and hearing the machines beep, click, and wheeze, for over eight hours, she had to get away, and sought her place of silence in the hospital chapel. Ten minutes after she sat down in a secluded spot, an agitated family entered the room. They formed a circle around a young man, bombarding him with questions. He calmly explained the problem with their elderly relative and the ultimate outcome. Eavesdropping on the conversation, even Hetty felt calmed by his words. She saw him look at one of the relatives and drew her over to the side for some additional words. Extremely impressed with his work that night, Hetty made certain to find out who he was and keep him in mind for work in the agency.

Hetty's inquiry into the man revealed that NCIS already had a file on him from when he wanted to sail from Marseille to Algiers. Floyd Huffman, the Special Agent in Charge in the Marseille office, had heard of this American student that wanted to study in Algiers, but couldn't get a student visa to accomplish this. He feared that this student would try to slip away on a ship from Marseille to Algeria. There were a lot of rumors that all hell was about to break out there and the first ones that would be killed would be the western intellectuals, especially foreigners. Even though Nate's faculty advisor had explained why he wanted to do this to a friend at the state department, Agent Huffman received orders to pick Nate up at the airport and detain him for questioning. The officials wanted to make sure that he was not intending to go to Algiers and bring back the Islamist jihad to the US.

Nate was interviewed by Clarence Hester, the NCIS profiler who happened to be at Marseille field office keeping watch on what was happening across the Mediterranean. After a short time, Nate realized who this man was, and their conversation turned into a mutual profiling session on the non-classified things that were going on in Algeria. The US government was extremely worried that this revolution would spill over into the neighboring Arab countries of Tunisia, Morocco, and especially Libya, and Agent Hester asked Nate to basically profile that possibility. From what he could remember, the student gave a fairly accurate assessment. It was at that moment that he knew he wanted to be a profiler for the government, and it was at that moment that NCIS officials started to keep a closer watch on him.

 **. . . . .**

When Hetty read the file on Nate Getz she decided that this man could not be lost to NCIS. She arranged for him to pursue his Ph.D. in Psychology at John Hopkins in Baltimore. At this time, Hetty was at the Washington DC field office, planning and executing proactive anti-terrorism enforcement operations around the nation's capital. She was also gathering information on the people she would want to put together to form an elite force of agents to fight these crimes throughout the country. This group of agents would need people in a support staff to help back them up, and Dr. Nate Getz would be an important part of that group. It was important for him to become acquainted with the workings of NCIS and the people he will be working with. By making sure he knew who was providing him with all these opportunities, she was binding him with ties of obligation and hoped it was enough to keep him working for his country instead of private practice.

Dr. Nate Getz received his doctorate and was posted to NCIS headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. His first duties were taking care of the NCIS agents' psychological health and well-being. After a short time, he was was promoted to profiling targets, especially among the jihadists terrorists and helping to set up missions to take down those threats. But he was always ready to answer any call that came from Hetty Lange and hurried to try to comply with her wishes.

 **. . . . .**

When Nell was seventeen and in prison, her psychologist, Dr. Tammy Blankenship, participated in a research study done by two students working on their doctoral psychology degrees, a Nate Getz, and Rylee Sanders. Nate was doing his doctoral theses on reasons why young people can be enticed to join a cult or terrorist organization. He was looking for ways to identify these young people so that the US profilers could have an advantage in the war on crime or terrorism. He watched several group sessions that included Nell and the other girls in the prison, trying to see if there were any indications on how these girls got involved in gangs or how they were used to lure young men into those gangs. The girls couldn't see them behind the one-way mirror separating the two rooms.

That first session with Nell was different than anything Nate had seen before. They started out like a bunch of teenage girls, behaving like only they could do, constantly arguing and trying to scream over one another. Nell was the only one just sitting there, not engaging at all in the mayhem. When the moderator left the room to get a cup of coffee, Nell looked at the girl next to her, whom Nate later found out to be Danita Rosales, her roommate and nodded. She then waited until the loudest voice was ready to take a breath, then she started talking over all of them.

"Look, we will never get what we want this way. We need to give a little to see what we can get for it," she said. "What do we want the most here?"

"Boys," one of the girls yelled.

"More TV time," was another's reply.

"Better food," was a third.

"Yeah, better food," several agreed.

"Okay, you know that they are not gonna let boys in her for us," Nell said with a smirk.

"Booo," was the answer she got to that.

"Let me see what I can do about the food," Nell offered.

The moderator came back, to find the room strangely silent, she looked around, and that's when Nell stood up and started talking, calmly and quietly. "We wanna work out a deal with you."

"What kind of deal?"

"We will settle down after lights out, no noise, except for emergencies, so the guards don't have to keep yelling at us."

"And what are you demanding in return?"

"We want better food. How about some jello at every lunch and supper, with pudding once a week? We could try it for a week."

"What if someone doesn't want to agree?"

"Cut them out of the bargain. If they continue to make noise, we will take care of them."

"Let me see what I can do." After she left the room to check, the girls all cheered and congratulated Nell.

"Did I just see what I think I did?" Nate asked Dr. Blankenship.

"This isn't the first time that she has done something like this. She is a very smart girl and finds ways to get people to go along with her." the psychiatrist told Nate.

"Why is she in here? She should be somewhere where she can use that mind of hers to full advantage."

"She was convicted of murder. She killed her step-father." was the answer he got.

Nate asked if he could read her file because he did not believe that such a small, intelligent girl could possibly have done what they claimed.

"How did she survive in here, she's such a small little girl," Nate asked himself.

"You see that girl sitting next to her? That's her roommate, Dani Rosales" Dr. Blankenship told him. "Supposedly she has some ties to the Norte del Valle Cartel, the Columbians, that now moved to Venezuela, and she has extended their protection over Nell."

Nate just shook his head at how complex and surprising this young woman was turning out to be. After he read Nell's file, he realized that she shouldn't have been there, and wondered if Henrietta Lange could do something about getting her out. Hetty took his report under advisement, and Nate found out later that she appeared at Nell's parole hearing, and successfully petitioned the court to seal her juvenile record.

 **. . . . .**

Hetty found out that Nate was doing his job too well. Other divisions of NCIS wanted him to do the psychological evaluations of their agents. Both the Middle East and the European and African field offices constantly asked him for help in profiling the leaders and movements in the Arab world. He was constantly busy, flitting from one area of the world to another. But he always made room for requests from Hetty.

September of 2010 found the Doctor in a rented Bethesda, Maryland office, waiting for a former CIA analysis to keep an appointment with him. Nell Jones had been fired from the agency for using their computers to try to find her sister. The agency psychologist, Dr. Daniel Skinner, informed her that he could not work with her anymore, but he gave her the name of another doctor who would take her on. So she met with Nate, who sat and listened to her. He did not take any notes on her in any of their three sessions. He was basically profiling her, listening to how her brain worked, to see if she should get an interview with Hetty. Finally, he gave her name to the old spymaster and got her approval to offer her a job interview. Giving her a Los Angeles phone number, he urged her to call and talk to the one who might offer her a job. She made the call and went to talk with Hetty, finally accepting the position offered. Nate did not meet her again until he was assigned to do the quarterly evaluations on the OSP team.

He disqualified himself from working with Nell, because of his previous association with her. Instead, he handed her over to Commander Roxanne Britt, a US Navy Reserve psychologist, now in private practice in Los Angeles. She was one of the backup psychologists that were available to Hetty whenever Nate was not available. The doctor specialized in those who suffered abuse and was perfect for working with Nell. When anyone on the team asked about it, Nate explained that he knew Nell before and that was why he couldn't work with her.

Even though Nate could not see Nell in a professional capacity, the two of them became good friends. The little redhead figured out all that the tall psychologist had done for her and thanked him, by getting him to bend down and placing a chastee kiss on his cheek. She was surprised by the blush that appeared on his cheeks. Slowly Nate's job evolved to NCIS using him more as a profiler, wherever a hotspot appeared throughout the world, and someone needed to be understood in his words or actions. While he was gone he asked Nell to keep an eye on the rest of the team and contact him if she feels he is needed. He felt very confident in her opinion, she was an analyst, after all, and with Hetty watching them professionally, and Nell watching them informally, he knew they were in good hands when he was gone.

Nell found out about his sweet tooth, and his passion for peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, and tried to send him a box in his care package every once in a while as he was circling the globe. Nate purchased a subscription to Asharq Al-Awsat, the International Arabic-language newspaper based in London. He had the newspaper delivered to her apartment, so she can keep up with her Arab language skills and also provided her with in-depth analysis, exclusive editorials, and comprehensive coverage of Arab and international affairs.

 **. . . . ,**

Except for Nell and Deeks, who saw different psychologists, Nate had knowledge of the team secrets, because they told him what was lurking in the recesses of their minds. He did speak with the analyst, after she had her first kill-or-be-killed encounter as Hetty's decoy, as well as the detective, after he had been tortured by Sidorov, but it was never a psych evaluation. With both of them it was always as a friend, mainly just listening, and letting them put their feelings and emotions into words.

Nate only did a couple of psych evaluations on Hetty when her regular psychiatrist could not be available to her. Dr. Edvard Schwartz normally kept office hours at his clinic outside of Strassburg in Austria. He did his studies under Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund. Nate wondered how much Hetty hid from him because she certainly did not divulge many of her secrets in their evaluation sessions. The biggest fear that she expressed to him involved Callen. She was so afraid that he would continue to take on the impossible challenges that always seemed to come to him and finally take something on from which he would never return. She knew that if that would happen, she could no longer go on with her work. But she also knew that she would not longer be able to go on with her life without him either.

Callen's greatest fears revolved around his family. He knew about his father's grave in Ruza, but still wondered if there actually was a body buried there. If not, his father was still running around the Russian countryside, hiding from those that sought his life. Even though he looked to Hetty as a surrogate mother, he hated the way that she dribbled out the information and facts about those he was related to by blood. He worried that something would happen to her before she would divulge everything she knew about his past.

Sam's greatest fears also revolved around his family. Twice he was involved in a deep undercover operation in the Sudan, one before and the other after his marriage to Michelle. Both times he had to get involved with a woman. With Isir, he left, before he knew she was pregnant with his son that he cannot acknowledge because of the political implications. With Jada, he got close enough to her to get her to turn her back on her family and country, but the way she looked at him gave strong indications that the relationship strayed into the physical. He never told Michelle about either of these women, just as he never asked her how far her CIA handler asked her to go as Quinn in her relationship with Isaak Sidorov. From what Sam saw when the arms dealer tried to escape with her shortly before Deeks killed the man for him, the two of them were more than close. Now his wife was starting to raise the possibility of going back to work for the CIA after Kamran got a bit older. Michelle was still a very magnificent and appealing woman. Could their marriage take another one of these deep cover operations that required such total physical contact?

Kensi's greatest fear was in her being alone. Throughout her life, the people she considered important to her were constantly turning around and walking away. Or else the circumstances she found herself in caused them to be ripped out of her life. The end result was always the same, she was left alone. Everyone joked about her being a hoarder, but few saw the reasons behind her failure to rid herself of anything, even the smallest piece of paper. If she could allow these things to be removed from her, it would mean that she was not worthy of having them in the first place. If she were not worthy to keep trash and junk around her, why would it be conceivable for her to expect the people she cared about to stick around? **What qualities of goodness could others see in her, when she couldn't see anything like that in herself?**

 **Eric's greatest fear was in growing older. While he was growing up, he breezed through all his computer classes in high school and college. Hetty had hired him as her technical guru, the one everyone counted on to provide the background of the cases they took on, and to constantly update the agents with the information they wanted and needed until the case was successfully closed. Through his cyberspace skills he managed to 'break' the internet, and his keyboard skills managed to get him into so much trouble that he was officially banned from Las Vegas. That was a tremendous summary of the skills and abilities that he had. But in that was the problem. Those were the things that he already had done. The same things were being regularly taught in in the classroom across the country these days. The more people did it, the easier it became to do, not like all of the trial and error attempts that he had to do to get it to work the first time. And these young 'kids' were the ones that Eric had to go up against each and every day. They kept getting younger and younger and smarter and ingenious, while he felt he was being left by the wayside. He didn't know how soon it would be before Hetty would hire a new 'genius' to replace him, but he saw it in his future and worried a little more about it every single day.**

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